


those left behind (we take up the arms)

by petrichor (findingkairos)



Series: you better do what’s right or you’re gonna lose the fight [1]
Category: Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse (2018)
Genre: Aunt May is out for (corporate) blood, Canon Compliant, Character Study, Gen, canon character death
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-20
Updated: 2018-12-20
Packaged: 2019-09-23 07:22:18
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,177
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17075903
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/findingkairos/pseuds/petrichor
Summary: She’d been ready for it, because she knows her nephew. Peter is – was –had beena good kid, and good kids like him don’t stay on the sidelines where it’s safe. They roll up their sleeves and pitch headfirst into danger. They help because it’s the right thing to do.Being ready to help in the technological aspect – suits, web shooters, and all – hadn’t made burying her nephew any easier.





	those left behind (we take up the arms)

**Author's Note:**

> This didn't quite go in the direction I'd planed, but, well. Aunt May makes her own decisions, and she stops for no one.
> 
> Not sure if I'll continue this, but it works well as a standalone.
> 
> EDIT: It has been pointed out to me by [the_athenian_pamphleteer](https://archiveofourown.org/users/the_athenian_pamphleteer/pseuds/the_athenian_pamphleteer) that it's the PDNY, not the NYPD, in the movie. I'm keeping it as the New York Police Department, though, since that's the title that I think most people are familiar with and to exclude confusion, so apologies for that small deviation from canon. (If you're curious, there's [an actual thread](https://scifi.stackexchange.com/questions/200427/why-is-jefferson-davis-morales-working-for-pdny-instead-of-nypd) talking about this very subject.)

She’d been ready for it, because she knows her nephew. Peter is – was – _had been_ a good kid, and good kids like him don’t stay on the sidelines where it’s safe. They roll up their sleeves and pitch headfirst into danger. They help because it’s the right thing to do.

Being ready to help in the technological aspect – suits, web shooters, and all – hadn’t made burying her nephew any easier.

May had been an engineer, back in the day. Technically she still is, and she’s good, but here’s the thing that rankles: she hadn’t been good enough to save Peter.

 

The coroner’s report says that Peter had died from blunt force trauma. There had been numerous other bruises and fractures and outright breaks, but the biggest one – the one that had made Peter go down and _stay_ down, regardless of his enhanced endurance and strength – had been the caving of his ribs.

It speaks of a moment of passion. A professional who is detached from the situation, the police tell her with their solemn expressions, would have been cleaner, emotionally, about it. A single bullet between his eyes, perhaps. A slit throat.

 

When May gets home, she wades through the gifts left outside her door and the reporters that are still vying for an interview with her. The police help her get into her house without being accosted, at least, but that doesn’t discourage them. More than a couple of gawking people on the street have their phones out, taking photos, taking video.

May pulls the curtains closed and leaves the lights turned off. Going to the shed right now would be inviting them to investigate it further, and anyway she doesn’t think she could step foot into the cave – the place where she still has Peter’s suits, Peter’s gear, all the things that she’d made because if her noble, stubborn nephew wasn’t going to stop putting his life on the line for strangers then she would be damned before he left without any sort of protection – without it knocking the breath out of her.

Instead, she sits in the kitchen and she goes through the list of people that have a valid reason to hate Peter. The list is long, unfortunately. May had been prepared for that, but reading the list in its entirety – a name-only document that’s just the tip of the iceberg, given her own records of who’s out for Peter’s blood and all public and not so public information available quietly hidden away on a separate drive – hits her with all of the force of a train.

The police had said it had been a moment of passion. Peter’s body had been found in an alleyway. The entire block around the site had been cordoned off, though that had been useless. Whoever had left Peter’s body there had known enough about the security cameras to avoid them. Right now, May has no lead on whoever it was that had killed her nephew.

The words – the names – go bleary. May puts her face in her hands and, for the first time since she’d got that call from the New York Police Department, she allows herself to cry.

 

May had been the one to outfit her nephew. The funds and the technology had all come from her. She’d enabled Peter. Indirectly, she’d been the one to send him to his death.

The fact still keeps her up at night, weeks and a funeral later.

 

The first one to find her after the seismic shift that rattles New York is Spider-Man Noir. He’s all black-and-white, taller than her Peter, with the gentleman bearings and odd accent to match. His cape blows in a wind that doesn’t exist. When May sees him for the first time, standing on her doorstep, she hits him in the face with her baseball bat.

Afterwards, when he stammers out an explanation including where he’d come from and how he’d been looking for a safe place in a world that is unfamiliar, she offers him a cup of tea. He takes it with more than a little suspicion, which only further confirms that this is not her Peter, even if the lack of color aside from black and white hadn’t. The confirmation still feels like a fresh stab in her chest.

This is a guest, then. May pulls herself together enough that when Noir makes a face, drinking the tea, to smile and ask if he’d prefer anything else.

He says that he prefers coffee, if she has any. May hasn’t bought coffee for the house since Peter’s grad school days, when he’d needed to rush to the university for his classes. She pulls some of what’s left out of a dusty cupboard and spends an inordinate amount of time staring at it, when her breath catches in her throat and the logo of Peter’s favorite instant coffee brand swims in her vision.

Noir, bless his heart, only rises with enough sound – that has to be deliberate; Peter could move without a sound if he’d wanted to, and May didn’t doubt that this one would be the same – to ensure that she could hear him coming, before he’d asked quietly if he could hug her.

She says yes, because this is a Spider-Man, no matter where he’s from, and this is a Peter Parker. A version of her nephew, though she doesn’t know him and he doesn’t know her.

The hug still feels like him, though, which is the thing that convinces May that this is real.

 

The next to arrive on her doorstep is Peni Parker, a girl with a robot whose appearance looks just the slightest out of place. She’s cheery and bright and inseparable from her robot. She doesn’t have an equivalent of a May, but she’d had a dad, and the difference is just enough that May can see the girl as a sort of niece instead of anything else.

Of all things, it’s the heelies that Peni uses to get around May’s house that makes her laugh. Noir raises his eyebrows beneath his mask – May has a lot of experience with reading people’s masks, metaphorically or literally – and Peni explains what they are. May is grateful that she does, because right after she’d laughed she’d been hit by the fact that somewhere in the house, she has a pair of Peter’s old shoes in a cardboard box. The pair with the holes cut into the heel, to make room for those wheels.

But together with Peni’s arrival, May is able to start piecing it together. The things appearing in the heart of New York and confusing the populace aren’t avant garde art, they’re dimensional instabilities appearing due to the same event that brought Noir and Peni to May’s dimension. The event that had rattled New York. The event that had been right before Peter’s death.

May is starting to get an idea of the timeline, and if her gut feeling is right, well. Heaven help whoever brought Noir and Peni to her dimension, because it’s starting to look like it’s the same person that found Peter poking around and didn’t like his attempted interference, and May has no mercy left for them.

 

Porker floats in through her kitchen window, drawn by the smell of the pie she’s baking for Peni. They don’t have apple pie when the years hit 3145, apparently, and in the Great Depression sugar-based recipes like pie are an incredibly rare luxury item. Noir and Peni both get into a scuffle with Porker over the pie.

May leans against the doorway and smiles for the first time in weeks.

 

She sits in the kitchen, a cup of tea in her hand. Going through the motions of making it had helped, when she’d been lying awake in bed and aware, for the first time in weeks, that her house is full of noise. The room that had been Peter’s is currently occupied by Peni; the living room downstairs and next to the kitchen is for Noir and Porker.

All three of them are aware that she’s awake, but they haven’t disturbed her yet. Trying to give her her space, most likely. May appreciates it, even as she stares into her mug of tea.

 _“Mr. Fisk invited me to his memorial dinner for Peter,”_ Mary Jane had said earlier that day. She had agreed with May that something’s fishy here. It could be the ruthless angling of a businessman who doesn’t care about how distasteful his machinations are, only caring about the profit, but.

But May has seen many New York City businessmen in her day – _still_ does, though it’s no longer under the guise of a PhD looking for grant money – and so she does some digging.

Just because Wilson Fisk is filthy rich doesn’t mean that he is safe from her. May had built the cave beneath her house from scratch, had constructed both the cave and everything in it with her own two hands. No matter how rich Fisk is, it’s difficult to conceal building a particle accelerator beneath the very foundations of New York. Maybe, if he had been careful, he could have done it by paying the right people in the right places. Even still it would have been difficult to hide it from someone who knows what they’re looking for, and May certainly knows what she’s looking for.

But then again, Fisk has made an enemy of her. Not of Spider-Man, but of May Parker, for trying to use her nephew’s name in a bid for influence. With her skills – rusty from disuse but one never really forgets how to hack into a company’s private network – finding out what he’s trying to hide beneath the city is child’s play.

In the process, she finds that Fisk is Kingpin, someone who is on her list of nemeses. It’s almost too convenient. If it’s true, the very villain that killed her nephew is throwing a memorial dinner for Peter Parker, and had invited Mary Jane to it. It’s in such poor taste that May can’t quite be sure if it’s real.

 

Noir and Peni and Porker aren’t the only Spiderpeople that had been dumped into a new dimension. There’s a version of Gwen, in her white costume and bright blue ballerina shoes. There’s Miles, the newly spider-bitten kid of her own dimension, and May _aches_ because she knows that Peter would have been eager to help show Miles the ropes. To be the mentor that he himself had lacked, all those years ago.

And there had been Peter B. Parker, who would have been the spitting image of her nephew, had her nephew had the chance to grow old. The hair is a dirty brown instead of blond, and there are years of pain and happiness both lining the creases of the oldest Peter’s eyes, but.

May strives not to lie to herself. She’s getting on in years. It’s not implausible that she die in a decade or two.

She knows the look in the old Peter’s eyes because she sees them in the mirror every morning in her own. The uncertainty that this is still real. For brunet Peter, it might be because he’s seeing someone that he’s long since buried. For May, well.

Every time a new Spiderperson comes through her door, she feels the hope that there’s an alternate dimension of _her_ Peter – one who’d managed to survive and escape, instead of being pinned down and beaten to death – gutter. And in this, too, May is old enough to know herself. It’s only a matter of time before that hope goes out.

But in the meantime, there are people that they need to return to their own dimension. It’s been lovely having life and laughter in the house again, if only for a short while, but they are people with their own lives in their own dimensions and they will die if they stay in hers.

 

Liv comes into her house with the stupid octopus costume and a lot of henchmen. It’s like they’re trying to get the band back together again, except they’re on opposite sides, now.

She can still hear Olivia Octavius’s voice, back when they’d been in college together: _My friends call me Liv_.

Liv works for the man that killed her nephew.

May picks up the baseball bat. She has no intentions of killing Olivia; Peter is a quiet voice in the back of her head. _We need to be better,_ he’d liked to say. Better means that she doesn’t strangle Olivia Octavius like the tightness beneath her ribs is encouraging her to, but if she can smack some sense into her college friend before she continues her quest to push the boundaries of science without thinking about the human cost, then May will take it.

“Oh great,” she says, and says it loud enough that Olivia will hear it. “It’s Liv.”

And May thinks, _Kingpin killed my nephew after all_ , and she knows in that moment she won’t kill Kingpin.

She will ruin him.


End file.
